Back to the First Place

Who told these people they could change?  It's so selfish -- as if this world were all about them.  Don't they understand that they were put on this earth to steward our nostalgia?

OK, so I'm kidding.  But it has been disconcerting.  We arrive in Vermont each year with memories swelling and touchstones to revisit, favorite sights to see and meals to eat -- a kind of scenic/psychic womb where warm and inner rhythms are reborn.  All this time I thought it was simply the place -- "Vermont", as though Vermont was merely a locale.  And indeed, it is largely intact; the mountains and lanes and leaves and woods.  All that drew us here in the first place still surrounds us -- the color, the vistas, the crisp air and the cozy embrace of the stone fences snaking their way through the countryside.  But we arrived this year to be greeted by unfamiliar faces -- the Inn had been sold; the cheese maker in the village nearby had moved to a larger town down the road; a familiar shop had closed, the owners having retired and moved away; even the ice cream shop across the river had relocated a half-mile away.  We began to check our map to confirm that we had come to the right place.

What I had not credited was "the second place."  If Vermont drew us here in the first place, it turns out to have been the people and their particular pursuits that textured and animated our returns.  It wasn't merely the Inn, for example, but the Inn as it was conceived by the Innkeepers whose guiding values and vision shaped its special personality.  Seduced by the illusion of permanence, we forgot that they, too, were alive and growing and perhaps growing beyond the Inn.  With only the slightest flint of melancholy we bless them in their new endeavors -- along with the retired shopkeepers and reinvigorated cheese makers and all the other living, growing and changing locals who have added so much blessing to our lives.

So we have been trying new things, just to get back into practice -- new trails to hike, waterfalls we hadn't before hunted down, villages in which we'd never parked and walked around.  The kind of stuff we did in the first place.  The kind of delights that led to the enjoyments of the second place.

And no doubt will again.  It will be different, but that's OK, too.  We will continue to treasure the memories -- and be nourished by them -- but it is healthy to be nudged beyond the "aw's" at what we are missing and into the "ah's" at what we are discovering.